A rabbi from Virginia opened the United States Senate with prayer this morning. Rabbi Israel Zoberman of Congregation Beth Chaverim  in Virginia Beach delivered the Senate prayer this morning at the invitation of Senator Warner. It wasn’t his first visit: Rabbi Zoberman also delivered the Senate’s morning prayer ten years ago as a guest of Virginia Senator George Allen.

Rabbi Zoberman was born in Kazakhstan in 1945 to Polish Holocaust survivors. He was raised in Israel, moved to America in 1966, and founded Congregation Beth Chaverim in Virginia Beach in 1985.

"Our one God of life's blessings who brings us together to be one family, gratefully united though gloriously diverse through the divine commandments of loving-kindness,” Rabbi Zoberman said in his prayer today. “May the awesome author of an enchanting yet endangered universe uplift our honored Senators with the essential twin gifts of freedom and responsibility, ever fulfilling the demanding American dream. At these crossroads of compelling challenge, may the Senators be reassured that each human life is a singular journey of promising purpose, that the Creator's divinity and human dignity are inseparably linked."

Concluding his prayer today, Rabbi Zoberman said, “Recalling my early childhood in a displaced persons camp in Germany’s American zone, and on my 40th anniversary in the Rabbinic ministry in the most ecumenical nation under heaven, I am grateful.”

He was accompanied to Washington today by his wife and their son, Harel.